Twelve New Zealand poets

Edited by Jack Ross

Poems by Scott Hamilton

All surgeons are relatedto their patientsby blood.The best surgeons work quicklyin the dark.At eight o’clock the lights in the psych wardflick off, cellphones and girlfriendsare taken away,and the nurses turn to guards.You lie still in the blackout,waiting for a bombing raid.

You often askabout the past.The past is a piece of rough skin solderedto the back of your head.Hair is beginning to grow over it.You slept through the surgeryand screamed only once,just before you woke up.Your comrades in the wardscreamed in sympathy.Now, every night, the dream plays backwardsat exactly the right speed,so that you can admire the hipsand the cheekbones of the womenas they fly slowlyout of their craterback up to the market square,and slip their clean dark hands back into their purses,or back onto the bomb-shapedloaves of bread,onto quinces and mangoesas smooth as freshly-skinned heads.

At the end of the ridge,in a carolling farmhouse,Jehovah is being born,but this is the groveof unadvertised Gods,the place where they went huntingstar and owl,the place where they come huntingus.Somebody has writtenWESTSIDE 4 EVAbeside Hiku’leo’s sharp-winged prey.

“Elegy for a survivor of the war on Afghanistan” was first published in Reading the Maps(August 6, 2010); “Walking to the Dendroglyphs on Christmas Eve (a dream)” in Reading the Maps(December 27, 2010); “The Parachutist” in Reading the Maps (August 17, 2011).

Jack Ross has curated this feature devoted to twelve contemporary “unsung” New Zealand poets, whose work reveals the “immensely varied undergrowth of experimentalists, zealots, eccentrics, and prophets of various stripes," accompanied here by a number of images by the New Zealand artist Emma Smith.